Giving up coffee: why I went cold turkey on the demon bean

Olly Mann thought he couldn't function without several cups of coffee
each day, until he realised he was displaying all the signs of chemical
addiction. Now an evangelical reformed caffeine junkie, he's keen to spread
the message.

A year ago, I gave up coffee. I’d been a four-a-day man: four cups of ‘proper coffee’, that is; none of your limp-wristed babyccino poser coffee. Yep, I’d hand-grind the beans at home, like a proper lunatic, and steep it for ages in a stupid metal press I got from a catalogue, and take massive swigs from a super-sized mug I’d purchased as a souvenir from an American brasserie. The sort of mug clearly designed for display, not for drinking from. A mug so ludicrously large you could drown a baby in it.

Throughout my twenties, this is what I did. Then, one morning last year, I experienced something a little bit like a palpitation. Hello, I thought, you’re about fifteen years early - I haven’t been eating that many burgers, and I pay for the gym every month, which is much the same as using it. Then I realised: this wasn’t a cream-and-chips kind of palpitation. I knew, and don’t ask me how I knew, but I knew: this was a coffee-related palpitation. It had a caffeinated urgency to it.

So, I gave up coffee. Cold turkey. Not exactly Trainspotting, but, look, I’d given up a drug. A drug I was dependent on. There were headaches, there were mood swings. Day one, it was as if I never even woke up. The hot cup in my hands, the warm liquid caressing my throat, the energy hit coursing through me – these, for more than a decade, had been the signals that I was awake, that it was Work Time. Without these indicators, how could I be ready to work at all?

Days two to four were similarly tough. And then, day five, 7.00am, my alarm rang, my eyes opened, and I felt… entirely awake. As if I’d already had my morning coffee. Here was the revelation: I’d spent my adult life believing I was an ‘evening person’; one who could only function via endless topups of warm stimulus. Yet now, I realised, my previous inability to get out of bed without coffee was itself a symptom of coffee addiction. With coffee cut out, my addiction had waned, and, presto, mornings were entirely bearable.

I started getting evangelical about this, and told all my friends. Quite correctly, all my friends told me I was being a prick. Coffee was one of the few pleasures they had left; their sexual shenangians no longer the escapades of their college years; their career aspirations compromised to pay a mortgage. Coffee was cheaper than cocaine and legal and delicious and essential, they said. They couldn’t drive to work, sit through meetings, finish a meal or wake up the next morning without coffee, they said. I told them to think back over what they were saying, replacing the word ‘coffee’ with the word ‘vodka’. If it were vodka, or almost any other drug, it wouldn’t seem so harmless, would it?

But coffee isn’t like other drugs. It is the world’s most popular drug, enjoyed by 80% of the global population. Nearly twenty years after the Friends first gathered in Central Perk, coffee shops are somehow still cool and popular; even during the recession; even when they don’t pay their taxes. And this despite a major recent study of over 40,000 Americans, demonstrating that death rates from all causes rise by more than half in people aged under 55 if they drink more than four cups a day.

Wake up, my friends, and smell the decaff coffee. Which is what I’m now addicted to instead.